RAM chosen to help manage international growth

Tessella favours RAM’s Best-of-Breed Fixed Asset Management solution as it plans growth strategy for Europe & North America

Tessella, one of the leading suppliers of high quality software development and services to the Scientific and Engineering community, has selected RAM as part of a new best-of-breed solution to replace the existing group-wide financial systems.

Founded in 1980, Tessella has just celebrated its 21st birthday by opening its first overseas office in The Hague. The company, which was formed by Managing Director, Kevin Gell, to provide customers with academic and technical excellence in product development and support, has recently seen a rapid growth in sales outside the UK and plans to establish new offices throughout Europe and North America.

This new phase of growth caused concern within the finance team over the effectiveness of the existing accounting system which had become increasingly expensive to maintain.

“We were facing a sharp rise in costs and decided to look for new accounting software,” said Peter Rainbird, senior analyst at Tessella. “One of the other problems we had experienced with our incumbent supplier was the awkwardness of interfaces with other business systems.”

“We recognised the need to build an integrated solution with strong links between applications,” said Rainbird. “Our auditors recommended Exchequer's 'Enterprise'.”

“One of the benefits we saw immediately was the ease of integration between Enterprise and other business systems,” explained Rainbird. “It meant we could build a best-of-breed solution with very close links between applications.”

“It has provided an extremely cost effective solution, especially in comparison with other integrated systems”

“Exchequer introduced us to its business partner, RAM, who we recognised as a leading fixed asset management supplier,” said Rainbird. “We've quickly found that by bringing together Exchequer and RAM we have removed many of the obstacles that the finance team used to face, like re-keying asset data. It has provided a extremely cost effective solution, especially in comparison with other integrated systems."

Tessella, which has offices in Abingdon, Burton upon Trent, Cambridge, Warrington, Welwyn Garden City and Winchester, implemented the joint system earlier this year.

“The group is expanding into Europe quite rapidly and the international accounting features like Multi-book, Multi-currency and Multi-lingual capabilities within the RAM product will be of tremendous benefit to us, especially in terms of providing statutory reports, both locally and at group level,” added Rainbird.

“You can't avoid noticing the similarities between ourselves and Tessella. Both software companies were established at about the same time to meet a specialist need and are together experiencing rapid growth outside the UK,” said Karen Conneely, RAM's marketing manager.

“Our investment in developing strong relationships with general ledger suppliers, like Exchequer, together with our success in working with leading system integrators and accountancy firms is driving our business through an unprecedented period of growth,” added Conneely.

“By providing true cross border functionality,” explained Conneely, “RAM has also proved that it can fully support its customer’s international growth aspirations.”